In the workplace environment there is increasing usage demand on printers and other web based production devices. This occurs in part because emergent in-house publishing, typified by a few large jobs each requiring large numbers of copies, and traditional office printing and copying, conversely typified by many short jobs randomly distributed during the workday, often compete for the same time and resources of a shared production device. If not controlled during the workday, a few large jobs can dominate a printer or other shared processing equipment, to the exclusion of multiple short jobs and to the loss of productivity of users who must wait for equipment availability. Alternatively, some large job users are reluctant to process their job during the normal workday, because it would dominate the production device. Particularly, this situation is aggravated by the recent proliferation of printers having optional or extended scanning, copying, and facsimile capabilities. Thus not only short vs. long run job users, but also multifunctional users can compete for a single production device. It is desirable in the art to develop a system and method for relieving competition of large and small processing jobs for a shared production device, without allowing large processing jobs to dominate the shared production device.